1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to non-linear video editing, and more particularly to a method and a device for seamless capture.
2. Description of the Related Art
Formerly, some traditional linear video editing methods needed to spend a lot of time and money in completing a processing effect, which was sometimes even difficult to be achieved. When the process of video editing enters non-linear editing, processing effect can be easily achieved by an equipment of non-linear video editing in a computer. Moreover, a linear video editing can not compete with a non-linear video editing in video quality, effect, expenditure, time, and application. Especially since 1995, digital video camcorders (DVC), after being on the market, have been massively adopted by mass media such as television etc. It is widely favored by the main trend of video customers currently. A DVC adopts the latest video skill, which makes great strides toward a new milestone in the processing of video editing. A DVC is a camcorder recording video and audio by digitalized method, and using high compressing ratio to write the compressed digital video into a tape. Therefore, a DVC provides video of high quality, digital video and audio, and a design of convenient operation. When we use a DVC to video a subject, no matter what topic it is (people, place, or things), we would almost rather divide a subject into several times and proceed to video than finish a whole video at once. Recording date, recording time, and time code will be recorded on a tape at the same time when a record button is pressed by a user. According to this, a DVC can offer a function of scene change detection. That is an individual part of each scene can be completed without manually dividing each scene. A user can quickly find the wanted scene in stead of spending much effort to look for the wanted scene from a tape with length of 10 minutes.
Nowadays, most non-linear video editing equipment has to cooperate with a computer and proceed to process special effects, such as video capture, clipping, and subtitles, by related editing software. Therefore, the facilities for video editing, including related hardware and software, play an important role in a solving plan for video editing. Traditionally a DVC equipment provides a function of seamless capture, which can capture a 20-mm digital video tape. However, it needs a large space to store the captured digital video. Take a digital video format as an example. A one-minute video will probably occupy space of 210 MB. To store captured video into a computer file system of FAT 32, which just has a hard drive capacity of 4 GB as a limitation, a user can only store a video file of a maximum content of a 20-mm tape. For this reason, the size of the file of captured video is limited by the capacity of 4 GB.
In order to overcome the limitation of 4 GB hard drive capacity in a computer file system, a method which was often used before is to estimate the file size of a video first, to split the video which is greater than 4 GB into several video files that is less than 4 GB, and then store them. General speaking, under the video standard of National Television Standards Committee (NTSC) a DVC can video 30 frames per minute, and a video data normally consists of several scenes. This will create more than ten thousand frames in an eight-minute video. Therefore, the traditional method of splitting video, to proceed to split a video by only judging its size, often splits frames of the same scene and stores them into different video files. It makes the process of video editing more difficult.